A Mississippi couple, Mr. and Mrs. Christmas, were locked in a lawsuit with ExxonMobil after discovering that the old refinery waste disposal site adjacent to their home was infested with at least eighty-four alligators. The alligators were said to have been introduced as reptilian canaries in the coal mine; their sudden death would indicate whether the site’s retention ponds had become toxic. In Florida, an eleven-foot alligator, nicknamed Fluffy, was sitting in a front yard, “looking for love.”

*This Week in Wild Animals is a public service for human beings compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book *Wild Ones.A couple expecting their first child traveled to Hawaii, hoping to deliver the baby underwater, surrounded and supported by a pod of wild dolphins. The couple explained that the healing powers of dolphins are well-known and that a “dolphin-assisted birth” would confer a spiritual calm on both laboring mother and child. An institute in Hawaii, devoted to “dolphinizing” planet Earth, was offering them guidance.

In Louisiana, water snakes were slithering out of a lake and coursing through storage closets and bathrooms of the state capitol building. Diamondback and yellow belly snakes were invading a park in Texas, and black rat snakes were falling out of trees onto a Washington, D.C. playground.

An Australian park ranger was among the first to see a new species of eight-inch, mold-eating fluorescent pink slug. (“As bright pink as you can imagine,” the ranger said, “that’s how pink they are.”) After nine months of rehab, a burned black bear named Boo Boo was returned to the wild. Marijuana farmers in Northern California were inadvertently killing spotted owls with rat poison.

A cougar ambushed two Yorkshire terriers in a region of Idaho called Surprise Valley, and a cougar ambushed a young man outside Banff, and might have killed him, if the man hadn’t beaten the animal back with his skateboard. A news report noted that “it was unclear why the man, who asked to remain anonymous, was carrying a skateboard on a wooded path while it was sleeting.”

Authorities at the Grand Canyon were concerned about increasingly close contact between tourists and the park’s “stubborn” and “unpredictable” elk. Habituating elk to people is dangerous—“All it’s going to take is one person gored and thrown over the edge of the canyon,” one scientist warned—but also, it seems, just demeaning. A bull nicknamed “Dennis the Menace,” for example, has been spotted walking around with his antlers tangled in Christmas lights, and a local described watching a boy toss rings over the antlers of a grazing elk while his father filmed it.

The small town of Marion, Kansas welcomed the thousands of turkey vultures that use the town as a stopover point on their migration, feasting on the local road kill and scouring the landscape for rotting crows. Although turkey vultures are often maligned, or seen as harbingers of death and misfortune, Marion has done its best to embrace its birds. One local woman hopes the turkey vultures will become a tourist draw and described how the soaring birds invariably concentrate over the town’s summer festival every June. The festival features family-friendly activities like the annual Spam-carving contest and rock-paper-scissors tournament and prominent entertainers like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. But, the woman said, “You’ll be sitting there, supposedly watching a rock and roll band, and you see most people are looking up, watching [the vultures] soaring around [instead.]”

After studying the calls of prairie dogs for twenty-five years, a researcher determined that, when warning other prairie dogs about approaching humans, a prairie dog will specify whether the particular intruder is fat or skinny and what color t-shirt the person is wearing.

Trespassing squirrels damaged electrical equipment in several states, leaving 3,000 homes without power in Ohio, 1,800 homes without power in Connecticut, 1,500 homes without power in Michigan and 1,467 homes without power in South Carolina. Presumably, these attacks on America’s electrical grid by squirrels were uncoordinated.